But do I tell them all that “You aren’t Arielle and Dani, begone from my sight”? Of course not. I had great friends in high school, and my friends here in university, I don’t get along with nearly as well. The difference is, when your next post comes out, I won’t be thinking “But the BIOSHOCK RANTS! How can I sit here and read this post when THE BIOSHOCK RANTS?! He’s a great writer, bu THE BIOSHOCK RANTS!! I CAN’T BE HERE!!!” Then, every few weeks, out comes “ THEY LIED TO ME, PRECIOUSSSS…” Full disclosure, I get the exact same feeling you get from BioShock – normally, your posts are intelligent, well-thought-out, and meritocratic. I’ve been a fan of the site for a long time, and follow it daily, but whenever you get on this BioShock tantrum, it’s a bit disappointing. If this happens every time you go into a game with expectation A, and get result B, it’s a miracle you play anything at all. So the only thing that makes you hate the game, instead of be ambivalent or even liking it, is five letters in the title which somehow invalidate the very existence of the game and call down the scorn and fury. If you’d played that demo without ever having heard of System Shock, you might not have liked it – but it wouldn’t have unleashed this barrage of rage. That’s a bit counterintuitive because you’ve played the demo, but think about it. So you’re going one step simpler than judging a book by its cover – you’re judging a book by half of its title. If the game had just been called BIO, I bet you’d be quite a bit happier. This is a good game, but it isn’t System Shock 3, so I hate it.” All this BioShock hate is basically you going “I wanted System Shock 3. Surely going around not playing games because they're worse than System Shock 2 is a losing proposition? I’m not going to go and snuggle the corpse for old time’s sake.

I don’t begrudge those that love the game. To play System Shock without the inventory, the mad AI, the electronic music, the cyberpunk setting, the taut resource management, the level-up abilities, and using thumbsticks instead of the mouse? No, I will not do that. BioShock is supposedly the “spiritual” follow-up to that, but it’s missing all the parts that made the series appeal to me. Keep in mind, System Shock is my super-extra-special favoritest game ever. Some regular commenters left, and I never saw them again. I played the demo and was completely underwhelmed. I didn’t want to open up this can of worms again, but the question deserves an answer: People keep asking if I’ll be getting BioShock now that I have a Xbox 360.

System shock game length